Understanding Personalization

Four years ago you couldn’t read an article or turn anywhere without hearing the newest buzzword on the street: personalization. Everybody from t-shirt shops to advertisers started claiming that they would be able to personalize your world and make their product fit your lifestyle. There was only one problem with this. Personalization is not an overnight success, it’s a constant cycle of learning and adaptation. It takes nine months to have a baby, right? Well, that adage holds true to understanding a consumer so well that you can truly deliver a personalized experience.

That is exactly what US Patent 2014/0136616 does. It aggregates content from multiple sources across the Internet, primarily sites with rich, interesting content, such as news, entertainment, and sports sites, and presents a set of recommendations to the viewer. When a viewer clicks through on a recommendation, they are directed to the original source. A consumer profile is created and follows the consumer through all of his browsing destinations. The formula includes the understanding of words and language to truly interpret the consumer’s intent when he visits sites. The algorithm works successfully in web browsers and on mobile platforms.

“As part of a large wireless company, C Spire, we were seeing a tsunami of data being generated by not only our own company but across every organization we were coming in contact with. We saw the opportunity and a real need to use that data to create what in our minds was the true meaning of personalization,” says Wade Smith, VP of Operations for Vu Digital.

“We designed the algorithm and then built a front-end application to render recommendations to content consumers. It was then that we realized that we had invented a unique form of personalization, but there was still a huge void in the content space in that we couldn’t properly recommend video, which we knew was about to dominate every website and mobile app on the market.”

Shortly after the invention of the algorithm, Smith and Talley started a new project with Vu Digital to create a product that allows a video to be analyzed as text so that video could be understood and could be personalized just like any other text-based content. That was the beginning of the product that Vu Digital now offers; Video to Data.

Video to Data (V2D) allows video to be analyzed so that meaningful metadata can be created. This metadata is used to enrich a content producer’s assets so that they are more valuable and are more easily discovered. V2D can be integrated into client workflows so that the metadata enrichment process is a critical part of a video’s lifecycle.

“By many accounts, video content will occupy up to as much as 90% of the world’s content that people encounter. Everything produced and published ranging from classrooms, to churches, to movie producers, to online publishers, and more will be in the form of video, so this product, which also has three patents pending, is an important one as well,” says Smith.